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I recently wrote a post — that was shared here on CSS-Tricks — where I looked at ways to use Unicode characters to create interesting (and random) patterns. Since then, I’ve continued to seek new characters to build new patterns. I even borrowed a book about Unicode from a local library.

(That's a really thick book, by the way.)

It's all up to your imagination to see the possible patterns a Unicode character can make. Although not all characters are good as patterns, the process is a good exercise for me.

And, aside from Unicode itself, the methods to build the patterns may not be so obvious. It usually takes a lot of inspiration and trial and error to come up with new ones.

More tiling

There are actually many ways to do tiling. Here’s one of my favorite tile patterns, which can be easily achieved using CSS grid:

Composition

Many Unicode pairs share some kind of shape with different angles. For example, parentheses, brackets, and arrows with different that go in different directions. We can use this concept to combine the shapes and generate repeatable patterns.

These are characters we use everyday. However, they give us a fresh look and feeling when they are arranged in a new way.

There's another pair of characters, ᚛, and ᚜. Placing them in the grid and scaling to a proper value connect them together into a seamless pattern:

It's like weaving with characters! We can even take it up a notch by rotating things:

Pattern using \169b and \169c

Rings

Last week, I joined a CodePen Challenge that challenged the group to make a design out of the sub and sup elements. As I experimented with them, I noticed that the two tags scaled down automatically when nested.

👋

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